A traumatic incident during Tiffany Haddish’s teenage years taught her to turn tragedy to triumph.
The Girls Trip star said in a new interview that she was raped at the age of 17 by a police cadet. “That whole experience put me in such a messed-up place for a long time, and I ended up going to counseling,” she revealed in her September 2018 cover story for Glamour.
Haddish, 38, told the magazine that she reported the alleged incident at the time, but she is still trying to find a way to help other victims and make a change.
“Me just yelling out people’s names with no thought behind it is pointless. I need a plan,” she said. “I could be a voice, but what’s a voice going to do — just keep talking? Or is there action behind it?”
The comedian’s past shaped the way she approaches men nowadays. “I notice that men are afraid of women that are aggressive. So to protect myself I become semi-aggressive,” she told the magazine. “You hear about, ‘Tiffany always hitting on somebody,’ but that’s to keep them from hitting on me.”
Years after the alleged sexual assault, Haddish came face-to-face with another man whom she has claimed was also physically abusive: her now-ex-husband, William Stewart. “The relationship got violent,” she alleged in the “Ex-Husband” chapter of her 2017 memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, without ever mentioning Stewart’s name. “He choked the s–out of me.”
The U.S. Army veteran has denied his ex-wife’s claims. He filed a lawsuit against the Last O.G. star in May.
